SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Mara Liasson is an American journalist and political pundit. She is the national political correspondent forNPR and also a contributor at Fox News Channel.

Liasson was a freelance radio and television reporter in San Francisco and worked at Berkeley’s KPFA before joining NPR in 1985. She was awarded a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship  in Economics and Business Journalism to study at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for a year; she took leave to do that in 1988–89, then became NPR’s congressional correspondent. She was NPR’s White House correspondent from 1992 to 2001, receiving the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Merriman Smith Award for daily news coverage for 1994, 1995 and 1997. She is now NPR’s national political correspondent.

Mara joined Fox News in 1997. She is a regular contributor to Special Report with Brett Baier and a panelist on Fox News Sunday. She has also worked as a panelist for the WETA-TV weekend news program Washington Week, which is aired on many PBS member stations.